The events in The Member of the Wedding occur during a "green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old". Frankie is so in love with the idea of her brother's wedding and so desperate to belong to something that she deludes herself into thinking she can join the couple in their wedded life.

She is growing, metaphorically and almost literally, too big for her sleepy little town, and she is desperate to discover the world beyond her horizons. Much of the novel is spent in her kitchen discussing wild plans with her enigmatic little cousin John Henry West and the bustling black cook Bernice Sadie Brown.

The novel is ethereal to the point of spookiness. McCullers' exposition is glorious and she paints a heady picture of a Southern town, "like a silent crazy jungle under glass". It is a miniature scene and therefore concentrated and suffocating. The Member of the Wedding is a story of teenage awkwardness and a struggle to come to terms with a confused sexuality – Frankie is a young girl in an increasingly adult body. An interlude with a drunken soldier who mistakes her for the adult she so desperately wants to be adds a troubling undercurrent to the text. For all her height and yearning, Frankie remains emotionally juvenile. This is an atmospheric and entertaining read.

Public Domain

At the opening of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas learns that she is an "executrix" of the will of a former lover, Pierce Inverarity. The will seems to hold hidden messages: clues to underground societies and conspiracies. It launches Oedipa into a mercurial quest for answers.

There are crazy characters with far-out names, the semiotics of which occupy great swathes of the darker corners of the internet. Pynchon leads us down dark alleys, through history, and in and out of science, giving the reader a mind-numbing take on love and truth. With Pynchon, strands of information act like eels: combining to become a seething mass, writhing, squirming and obscuring our view of the world.

Pynchon's mastery of physics and quantum mechanics is evident. Couple that with the human desire to discover the great correlation between all things and you find yourself with a convoluted, chaotic story. Eventually, of course, The Crying of Lot 49 dissolves into nothing.

There is no solution, Pynchon tells us – things just are. We constantly search for answers, but we cannot alter the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy seems to be the ultimate subject for the great bafflers – Bellow, Gaddis and Pynchon. Bellow isn't quite inventive enough and Gaddis, worthy yet outmanoeuvred by Faulkner, has fallen. But Pynchon has that extra zip. The comedy can feel outdated but his subject, the great, big, crazy universe, is timeless.

Winner: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Next: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop v F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned.